Title and/or Abstract:
Mircea Eliade's View of the Study of Religion as the Basis for Cultural and Spiritual Renewal.

Douglas Allen

Texts, contexts, and interpretations dynamically
interact in complex, often contradictory, relations. This is true
of Eliade's personal historical background: Eliade's construction
of specific kinds of texts and how these are integrally related
to the specific Romanian, Indian, and other contexts within which
he lived. This is also true of Eliade's reception in the USA:
how Eliade's texts were interpreted and received is integrally
related to the specific historical, political and scholarly contexts
within the United States.

My primary interest is how Eliade's historical background
did or did not shape his scholarship and the reception of his
works. I believe that his scholarly attitudes, commitments, and
methodology were partially or largely shaped by his personal,
psychological, cultural, historical background. And his reception
in the USA was greatly determined by how he fit into specific
historical contexts within this country. At the same time, I am
not a mechanistic, historical determinist. I do not want to reduce
completely Eliade's scholarship and his reception to such historical
determinants. But I also do not believe that we can understand
Eliade's scholarship and reception by completely detaching them
from their historical contexts.

It is my position that some of Eliade's defenders
and critics have at times oversimplified what is a rather complex
and ambiguous picture. On the one hand, Eliade was well received
by a small group of influential scholars at the University of
Chicago and became the dominant figure in the Chicago School.
The fact that Joachim Wach invited Eliade to the USA and Eliade
succeed Wach as the dominant professor in the History of Religions
at Chicago is revealing.

On the other hand, most scholars of religion rejected
Eliade's approach as methodologically uncritical, unscientific,
antihistorical, arbitrary, and outdated. Leaving aside Altizer's
book in 1963 (which is more about Altizer than Eliade), there
was not one scholarly book written about Eliade published in the
United States (or anywhere else) for over 20 years after Eliade
had come to Chicago (even though Eliade's most significant scholarly
books were written in France in the late 1940s and 1950s and were
available in English). For several decades, this rejection or
dismissal of Eliade had little or nothing to do with his personal
or political history, such as his relationship with Romanian fascism.

By examining some of the different contexts in the
United States from the 1950s when Eliade came to the US to 1986
when he died-50s aftermath of McCarthy period, 60s counterculture
and interest in India and nonWestern spirituality, 70s and 80s
conservative backlash against liberal projects of modernity, and
so forth-we can better understand some of the appeals Eliade had
to very different audiences.

Even Eliade's appeal as a conservative within different
conservative contexts can be ambiguous and contradictory. There
are certain kinds of orientations, as seen in aspects of Eliade's
life and works, that may seem to be quite radical, but which can
be tolerated, or even at times appropriated, by conservatives.
There are other kinds of nonEliadean radical orientations, such
as those grounded in historical analysis, that must be rejected
by conservatives.

I want to explore the complexity of the reception
in terms of the backlash against the Enlightenment project and
a certain kind of anti-modernism. Eliade's personal and scholarly
history of anti-modernism gave rise to ambiguous and complex receptions.
The usual anti-modernist reaction was methodologically and politically
conservative: a nostalgia for some pre-modern condition, a nonhistorical
legitimation of rather static, premodern, hierarchical structures
of domination, and so forth.

But this was not necessarily the case. I shall try
to elaborate on how some scholars, including myself, did not completely
reject Eliade, but their reception of Eliade was selective. They
found much that was valuable in Eliade and tried to incorporate
this in some nonEliadean synthesis and orientation. The dissatisfaction
with much of modernism, for example, need not lead to a romantic
pre-modernism. It can also lead to a post-modernism or to the
adoption of a significantly re-formulated modernist project. I
shall show how this has contributed to the ambiguous and contradictory
reception of Eliade.

Douglas Allen is associate professor of Philosophy
at the University of Maine at Orono. He gained his PhD from Vanderbilt
University and has studied at Yale and Benares Hindu University.
He has published Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics
in Mircea Eliade's Phenomenology and New Directions (The Hague,
Mouton, 1978); "Eliade and History," in the Journal
of Religion (68 (1988): 545­565); and, with Denis Doeing,
Mircea Eliade. An Annotated Bibliography (New York and
London: Garland, 1980). Prof. Allen's Mircea
Eliade on Myth and Religion was published by Garland Press in 1998.